About the only time I find myself using regular Wikipedia these days is if I need to know if someone died since August 2025 when this ZIM dump was created.
About the only time I find myself using regular Wikipedia these days is if I need to know if someone died since August 2025 when this ZIM dump was created.
Seeious question - since Wikipedia doesn’t serve ads, wouldn’t a drop in direct traffic be a good thing for them? It would reduce their server costs and presumably the people who truly value Wikipedia (contributors and donors) would still use it for its intended purpose.
Ignoring the population as a whole getting dumber, which seems to be a side effect of everything these days.
Wikipedia relies on people reading it and realising “Wait, that’s wrong…” to fix inaccuracies.
Recently some PR company was caught taking money to whitewash the Wikipedia pages of their clients. The more people that are looking at the pages, the more likely it is that someone will realise they are being manipulated maliciously.
People are doing less reading
I don’t think that is a net positive
My concern would be losing market share to other sources resulting in Wikipedia slowly being forgotten by future generations. Then the downstream of effects of fewer new contributions, and increasingly consolidated moderators.
Then not being at the forefront of the Internet hurts prestige that reduces donations. I agree with your point on ad revenue vs server costs, but I imagine a 20% reduction in traffic hurts their long strategy more than a 20% reduction on hosting costs.
Technically, yeah. But with less people going to Wikipedia directly there would probably stand to be less chance of getting any new contributors. I’m not sure how the foundation gets all its money, but the more traffic they serve the more they can prove their relevance which might matter for funding
Maybe I’m cynical but the type to use just the AI overview and the type donating to Wikipedia probably doesn’t have that much overlap